


Six Cross-Stitch Pieces Inesser Finished, and One She Didn't

by tonepoem



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: F/F, Gen, Minor Character Death, arts and crafts the Kel way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-14 01:21:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16903419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tonepoem/pseuds/tonepoem
Summary: Whenever Inesser remembers her past, it's through all the cross-stitching she's done.





	Six Cross-Stitch Pieces Inesser Finished, and One She Didn't

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hangingfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hangingfire/gifts).



1

The first time Inesser finished a cross-stitch project, she was ten years old. Her youngest mother liked to sew, in the sense that she collected exclusive Andan kits from Cross Stitch Project of the Month clubs. Once in a while a kit would be held up by the parcel system and be confiscated by the Vidona for reasons that were initially obscure to Inesser. Later in life she would come to wonder if there was some club of crafty Vidona who took a fiendish pleasure in finding excuses to purloin expensive kits for their own stitching pleasure; but at ten she wasn't that cynical yet.

In any case, Inesser's mothers indulged her with small, sensible projects, like handkerchiefs with small, sensible designs printed on a corner, or locket fobs. Inesser did not want a small, sensible project, least of all something with the design printed on the fabric, as opposed to a proper chart. Inesser wanted a large, impressive project, even if she stabbed herself--she disdained thimbles--and her back hurt from hunching over the embroidery frame.

So Inesser strategized. She smiled and dimpled prettily (in those days she had excellent dimples) whenever one of her well-meaning mothers gave her an insultingly easy kit for children. She worked industriously on the insultingly easy kits whenever they watched her during her free time.

Inesser's youngest mother had a habit of starting large, impressive projects and then abandoning them whenever she got bored or the next month's kit arrived (if it did). Inesser, aware of this, feigned mild interest. The hard part was not feigning interest; the hard part was concealing how _fanatically devoted_ she was to the minutiae of these kits. She was going to swipe a kit and complete it in secret, and she was going to pick the _very best one_.

Inesser's heart was won by a magnificent and borderline heretical portrait of an ashhawk in chains. The chains had to be sewn with genuine gold thread, which Inesser knew from experience that her youngest mother would lose patience with rapidly. Inesser had never couched gold thread before, but that didn't worry her. She was not above sneaking unused thread from other kits in service of her dream project.

An agonizing three ten-day weeks after Inesser's youngest mother gave up on the ashhawk, Inesser made her move. While all her mothers were at a cocktail party, Inesser sneaked into the cross-stitch stash and made off with the kit of her dreams. She lay awake all night wondering if her mothers would notice and punish her. They never did.

It took Inesser the better part of eight months of sleep-deprived nights to finish the ashhawk in chains. It was worth every moment. She hid the finished piece from her family all the way until she left for Kel Academy Prime.

2

During Inesser's first year at Kel Academy Prime, the senior cadets told her scornfully that no one would have time for mere _hobbies_. Inesser was determined to prove them wrong, and to do so in style. She was also, if she dared admit it to herself, proud that she had chased down an elusive exclusive chart by a rare Kel cross stitch designer, Major Kel Vezu.

Admittedly, there were frequently times when Inesser wondered if she was going to be able to complete the work that year. What with all the push-ups, running, riflery classes, and generalized sleeplessness, it was hard to snatch those precious moments of unscheduled time and work diligently on her cross-stitching. But Inesser prided herself on her organizational ability and wasn't going to let the mere fact of Kel Academy defeat her. And it helped that her bemused mothers were happy to send her embroidery floss instead of more popular articles, like chocolates or meditation candles. (Or alcohol. Cadets weren't supposed to have it their first year, but the rule was sometimes flouted.)

In contrast to home, it was impossible to keep secrets in the cadet barracks. Inesser soon gained a reputation for two things. First was her passion for cross-stitching, which most of her peers found frankly incomprehensible. Second was her excellence at dueling. Inesser dueled a _lot_ of people who made nasty cracks about her choice of hobby. She almost always won.

Once Inesser had finished the piece, she found two errors. A less determined Kel would have just left it at that, but she gritted her teeth and spent several hours of one of her days of leave fixing the problem. It wasn't possible to be a perfect cross-stitcher any more than it was possible to be a perfect Kel, but damned if she wasn't going to _try_.

3

Inesser gave away most of her cross-stitch pieces, either to her parents or to friends or lovers likely to appreciate them. She was, however, determined to stitch something to commemorate her upcoming graduation from Kel Academy Prime. By now, as a senior cadet, she could wrangle a _little_ privacy when she needed to.

Inesser would never admit it, but like many ambitious cadets, she had already dreamed up an emblem of her own. Most cadets, of course, would never go on to become any sort of general. Inesser was _positive_ she would make general someday if she lived. The hard part was living, something that the Kel were notoriously bad at. (She knew all the jokes, even if she didn't indulge in them herself.)

It wasn't the first time Inesser had designed her own cross-stitch chart, which was good. She didn't want to stitch, as the Nirai would say, a _prototype_. But she had a very good idea of what she wanted, and her middle mother, the one who was Andan-descended, had given her a surprisingly good background in graphic design.

So it was that the final piece Inesser stitched in Academy was the Three Kestrels Three Suns, decades before she would have an opportunity to register the emblem as a newly minted brigadier general. She hid her future emblem rolled up with some napkins and never allowed anyone else to see it, just in case she jinxed herself. Years later, she was convinced that her commitment to secrecy had brought her the promotion she had yearned for.

4

The first time Inesser lost a comrade in battle was on a dreary world that was mostly tundra. She'd coveted a bannermoth posting but hadn't received it, not yet. Still, she counseled herself to patience and was determined to show the commandant of the local Kel base that she was a valuable lieutenant.

Inesser later remembered many things about her second battle. The second, not the first; the first had been a farcical affair against poorly organized guerrillas, scarcely worthy of the name. Kel overconfidence worked against them in that second engagement. She'd pull the records--those available to a mere lieutenant, anyway--and go over them again and again for weeks trying to figure out what had gone wrong; would be able, decades later, to draw a map of the whole sordid defeat, to list the units lost, to explain what had happened.

She didn't want to retreat. No Kel ever did, or anyway, no Kel would admit to it. But the order came from above, and she had to obey. She'd been told over and over that retreat often aggravated losses. But it wasn't her call.

It happened between one step and the next. Lieutenant Kel Haja, who'd always responded with such cheerful and sarcastic affection to Inesser's conversational overtures, had trouble keeping his privates in line. Two of them slipped out of formation; the formation shield faltered; a sniper took advantage of the opportunity and picked him off. Inesser wasn't close enough to hear it, but she _saw_ it through her augment.

Circumstances were such that Haja's unit was unable to recover his body. Nor could Inesser intervene. She had her orders.

It was a point of great shame to lose a Kel body, to have nothing to offer to the pyre, no token to send to the bereaved.

Inesser spent the next several months stitching a tribute to Haja. It was not a particularly original stitchery. She leaned heavily on stereotypical visual tropes, ashhawks, black, gold, swords, everything. A grief-offering was no place to be avant-garde. She sent it, with her captain's permission, to Haja's family.

Afterwards Inesser took all the needles and leftover thread from that project and offered them to her own private pyre.

5

Inesser liked to think about Hexarch Nirai Kujen as little as possible. They'd assigned her to him so that she could, in Kel Command's words, "offer firsthand feedback on weapons system development." She'd disliked him on sight, or more accurately, the sight of all the unearthly handsome men that fawned on him. It didn't take a genius to figure out that the hexarch's lovers were all victims of psych surgery.

Once she completed her tour of duty and was assigned to a hazardous but more congenial post at the High Glass border, she began a stitchery to express, mutely, her feelings about her time with Kujen. For the first time in many years, she stitched without a chart or a plan, used up valuable and rare silks in ugly gashes of clashing color across the fabric

Kujen loved beauty and refinement. She'd seen her own tendencies in that direction reflected in his eyes, and hated herself for it. It was frankly a relief to make something objectively hideous. People always asked her about it--she framed it and put it on the wall of her primary residence--but she always smiled and declined to answer.

6

If they hadn't both been Kel, and if she'd been a few decades younger, Inesser wouldn't have minded courting Miuzan. Inesser never so much as hinted at this. Hawkfucker jokes were only funny when they didn't have a grain of truth in them. If Miuzan ever guessed, she showed no sign of it; she was a devoted subordinate, yes, but in a perfectly conventional way for any high-ranking hawk.

Still, when Miuzan was promoted to colonel, Inesser made a point of presenting her with an elaborate piece that incorporated Miuzan's signifier. Miuzan's taste in decor was typically Kel, and Inesser knew better than to expect an unguarded response to the gift. But Miuzan's thanks seemed genuine enough, and she displayed the framed piece proudly in her office.

7

Inesser started her most ambitious lifetime project on the day she first asked Lyoshke to have dinner with her. Lyoshke hadn't said yes then, but she hadn't said no exactly, either. _Try me next week,_ she'd said with that conspiratorial smile, and Inesser had sworn to do exactly that. Lyoshke said yes next week, beginning a long and pleasurable courtship. And indeed, Lyoshke finally agreed to marry her.

Through all the years they knew each other, Inesser worked on that one project for Lyoshke's sake. It was as well that her other two wives weren't the jealous type; indeed, one of them liked to tease Inesser about her obsession with bits of colored fiber. _This is for you,_ Inesser said over and over, _it's going to be magnificent, and it's still not one-tenth as magnificent as you are._ For her part, Lyoshke liked to play the keyboard for Inesser while she stitched, and stitched, and stitched.

But Lyoshke died young, too young, and after that Inesser put the unfinished piece away. At first it was grief. Then it was because, irrational as it was, she liked to think that so long as she left the piece incomplete, the love that she and Lyoshke had shared would never end.


End file.
